Abacus mode

[jonathanbyrne]

I think everyone would agree that what calc really needs is an abacus mode.

[MicrosoftIssueBot]

This is your friendly Microsoft Issue Bot. I've seen this issue come in and have gone to tell a human about it.

[HowardWolosky]

For changes like these, we like to follow the feature pitch template from our New Feedback Process. Can you take a look and update the details of your idea? That should also help us qualify who "everyone" is and how the feature would work.

[contextfree]

If there ends up being a lot of interest in novelty features/modes like this, I wonder if they might be good use cases for an extension system. Maybe we should keep track of these proposals for use as motivating examples for the design of such a system if one is ever implemented.

Alternatively people could make their own forks for this sort of thing, but then there's still the question of how the project could be factored to make it easier for forks to keep up with changes in the default app.

[mamichels]

Abacus feature Despite the common belief that the abacus is already being superseded by the electronic calculator, plenty of use cases can still be found in the daily life of lots of people. While most people in the west would agree not having seen one in the last few years, a lot of asian and african countries still heavily depend on such methods. It has already been proven that the efficienty of certain operations is superior to the use of electronic calculators.

Why would we need this? While our daily life has probably never lead us into thinking 'why not learn to use the abacus', research has shown a significant increase in cognitive abilities and brain development. [1]

For most of the asian countries the abacus is still thought in school, enabling the later teached mental abacus. The mental abacus system has shown even greater impact on the individuals abilities to solve mathematical operations. [2]

Most of us would agree on the unnecessity of such a feature published to the millions of already pleased windows user, but we should focus the discussion on our responsibilities emerging out of the designs we, as software engineers, publish to all of our users. It is up to you to decide whether you want to reintroduce such nearly forgotten methods for the benefit of something greater.

What should be accomplished? A simple tool to see the principles behind the abacus system. It shall by no mean replace any given function but let the user to decide if he wants to use the abacus system.

Since the abacus efficiency relies on speed the controls have to be as easy and fast. Preferable fully keyboard controlled

What we dont need are any additional features making it more complicated, e.g. no options to adapt the style of the feature in any way. You can't do it with your real abacus as well, it comes as it comes.

Reference [1] Weng J, Xie Y, Wang C, Chen F. The Effects of Long-term Abacus Training on Topological Properties of Brain Functional Networks. Sci Rep. 2017;7(1):8862. Published 2017 Aug 18. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-08955-2

[2] Stigler, James. (1984). “Mental abacus”: The effect of abacus training on Chinese children's mental calculation. Cognitive Psychology. 16. 145-176. 10.1016/0010-0285(84)90006-9.

[contextfree]

@mamichels I'm ashamed I called this a "novelty feature" - clearly I lack vision and wisdom!

[PurHur]

Very interesting approach. At first i thought this is a troll issue and it fully escalated into a very interesting feature with huge potential in research and development, especially for concepts of the modern calulator. As everyone in this discussion is already in picture on the concept I dont think that this issue will be solved with a new feature pitch. This is unquestionably more and Microsoft should absolutely look into this. The abstract of @mamichels shows that this is by no mean a "novelty feature" and could have great potential on the windows calculator. I'm really looking forward for this, please keep us updated.

[ghost]

Thanks again for submitting your idea! However, after reviewing this pitch more closely, we do not believe it is a great fit for the product at this time. Thank you for your contribution to Calculator!